The West is lurching through a collective guilt trip, suffering through a crisis of cultural self-confidence. . . . its sense of its own tradition has been rocked hard, and the Christian banner under which it flew, thoroughly shredded. . . . Pope Benedict XVI relates, "Unless we embrace our own heritage of the sacred, we will deny the identity of Europe. . . . There is something deeply alien about the absolute secularism that is developing in the West."

The American Dream begins and ends with a job that can support a marriage, a family, a home and an education for the kids as well as providing paid holidays, vacations, health insurance and retirement security. The traditional path to the American Dream has been higher education, but the skyrocketing costs at colleges and universities across the land are forcing young Americans today to take on such debt via student loans that they may may be undermining, if not sacrificing, their future financial ability to get married, buy homes and have families

Significant lifestyle changes hailed as progress a generation ago in the West are now being questioned if not re-examined in light of the fact that the so called "sexual liberation" unleashed in the 1960s and 1970s has for all too many "baby boomers" and "Gen Xers" led to an unprecedented need for two income families who now struggle to buy homes and have children. The result: low birthrates across the Western world that will dramatically decrease their populations by the end of this century!

International recognition of Therese Neumann's stigmata as well as accounts of her supernatural visions, bi-locations and expiatory suffering for the miraculous cures of others drew its share of skeptics but not among the Nazis in her own native land. Before and during the war, the Nazi press banned all references to her, except when it once falsely reported that she was a Hitlerite herself and in another instance it stated that she was dead. In fact, the Gestapo murdered two of her non-clerical chroniclers, journalists Fritz Gerlich and Friedrich Ritter von Lama, and the SS shelled her home in Konnersreuth, Bavaria when nobody in the village would turn her in. Also not included among the skeptics were over 12,000 American GIs who visited her at the end of WWII and throughout the postwar occupation, including one GAPA member's father-in-law! The Incredibly Shrinking West!

The early life of this Bavarian peasant who subsisted entirely without food and water for 35 years, from 1927 to 1962, and nourished only by the Holy Eucharist bore the stigmata (wounds) of Christ. These not so natural facts were substantiated by medical experts, some of whom were also astonished that after one prolonged period of observation, Therese didn't have the least bit of body waste--stool, urine or excretions of any kind--to examine!

Austria was the only land the Communist super power that was the Soviet Union ever agreed to return its sovriegnty to during the entire Cold war! What really caused the Red Army to withdraw from Austria during the darkest years of the Cold War in 1955?

Schmeling, despite his prowess in the ring, fought off attempts of becoming a pawn of both the Nazi regime and American boxing interests. The Nazis rewarded Schmeling by drafting him at age 35 into the Wehrmacht's paratroopers, though his comrades were almost half his age. His American detractors speculated for the rest of his life as to what extent he was a Nazi if he was at all. However, in 1989 he was made an Honorary Citizen of Las Vegas when the owner of the now former Sands Hotel, Henri Lewin, revealed that not only did Schmeling hide him and his brother Werner during the Kristallnacht outrages in Berlin in November of 1938 (six months after the Louis fight) but helped to smuggle them out of Germany!

Schmeling's fame, if not notoriety for some, came to him primarily for his two fights against Joe Louis in 1936, and, especially, 1938, in which he was portrayed in the American media as Adolf Hitler's "Nazi Superman." Schmeling proved, however, despite circumstances on both sides of the Atlantic beyond his control, to be very much his own man not only then but throughout his long life!

Former Chicago German American journalist and publisher (Amerika Woche) Werner Baroni recollects an interview with 4 time US Gold Medalist at the 1936 Berlin Olympics Jesse Owens which provides a surprisingly different view of Owens' reception by the German people than heralded by the US press at that time!

It is sad but true today that some claim Christianity to have been at the roots of the anti-Semitism that eventually led to Nazi Germany. After all, weren’t Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler and all the rest of the Nazi henchmen ‘baptized’ Christians. This alleged Nazi/Christian axis, however, is a slanderous if not false understanding of Nazi doctrine itself, for the historical record clearly indicates that Christianity was correctly perceivedby Nazi ideologues to be a dangerous threat to the Third Reich, and not just because the racial origins of Christianity were Jewish, but it was more so in how the Bible provided the moral basis of German society and culture that they loathed in that, at it's most basic core, Christianity holds that all men are created in the image and likeness of God! Provides a detailed account of the zealous persecution of the Catholic Church in the Third Reich by Nazi authorities who were intent on forcing Germans to choose Adolf over Jesus in order to promote if not realize the Nazi ideals of German master race superiority!

Written by American historian Victor Davis Hanson in relation to the Euro crisis and the future of the Euro Zone currency union. In it Hanson comments on Germany's present and undeniable economic predominance in Europe despite having "lost" two world wars in the previous century. Includes Pope Benedict XVI's thoughts on German virtue.

As only the first son of a German farmer could hope to inherit the family Hof, and land became as hard to come by as military service was as hard to avoid, during the economic downturns of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many of rural Germany's 2nd, 3rd & 4th, etc. sons emigrated to America in search of a grubstake to call their own. Many of us are their grandchildren or great grandchildren! Of Germans & Our Heritage.